Saint Margaret Church (Wolkersdorf im Weinviertel)

The Catholic parish church of St Margaret stands on a low hill above the village square in Wolkersdorf, a wine-growing town in Lower Austria’s Weinviertel. From the square a broad staircase, guarded by six stone saints of 1727, leads up to the main gate. In earlier centuries the slope was used as the parish cemetery, and several Baroque grave-monuments remain in place. The church is a late-Baroque hall with a Gothic choir and a tall west tower added in 1754. The nave, rebuilt in 1727, is covered by a barrel vault with lunettes, while the choir ends in a five-sided apse lit by round-headed windows set into the old Gothic tracery. Above the rood screen hangs a double-eagle stucco emblem of Emperor Charles VI, flanked by banderole ornament. The high altar of 1768 shows St Margaret in its altarpiece, and the two side altars carry statues of St Joseph and the Immaculate Conception in delicate rococo frames. Outside, the polygonal choir is braced by stepped buttresses and flanked by two-storey sacristies and a small stair-tower. A Baroque oil-bergh group of Christ in Gethsemane, an angel and a sleeping apostle, is set into the south-east choir wall. Inside, the marble font and the 1896 organ case with its four relief panels complete the late-Baroque picture, while the 1968 cross-reliefs and the 1866 copy of Van Dyck’s Crucifixion keep the interior alive for modern visitors.